Putting the Government’s Bits to Work

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced that 45 projects were awarded a total of 95 million hours of computing time on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. According to a statement from the DOE, this is part of the 2007 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. DOE’s Under Secretary for Science, Dr. Raymond Orbach, presented the awards at the Council on Competitiveness in Washington, D.C.

The supercomputers will allow cutting-edge research and design of virtual prototypes to be carried out in weeks or months, rather than the years or decades that would be needed using conventional computing systems, say DOE representatives. Of the programs selected, nine are from industry and include five new proposals and four continuations from last year.

Launched in 2003, the INCITE mission is to advance American science and industrial competitiveness. These awards will assist in that mission by supporting computationally intensive, large-scale research projects and awarding them large amounts of dedicated time on DOE supercomputers. The projects, with applications from aeronautics to astrophysics, consumer products to combustion research, were competitively chosen based on the potential impact of the science and engineering research and the suitability of the project for use of supercomputers.

Processor-hours refer to how time is allocated on a supercomputer. A project receiving 1 million hours could run on 2,000 processors for 500 hours, or about 21 days. Running a 1-million-hour project on a single-processor desktop computer would take more than 114 years.

—Esther Schindler

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